Manufacturing facilities need to move and store vast quantities of raw materials and finished goods. When either the raw materials or the finished goods or both are small in solid size or are liquid in form, economies of scale dictate that they be stored and moved in containers. Those same economies of scale cause such containers to be enormously cumbersome.
A forklift truck in a warehouse or manufacturing floor is a common sight, moving material on pallets from one location to another. The hydraulic or electric power is well used because the pallets are often stacked for efficient storage and the pallets are a well-recognized way to transport the goods from one location to another. The pallet can be made of sturdy wood, metal, plastic, or corrugated paper and serves merely as a facilitator of storage and movement.
Likewise, the container for the small solids or liquids is a well-recognized way to move and store such materials. Likewise, the container is another item that serves merely as a facilitator of storage and movement, i.e., material handing. Containers can assume all solid geometry shapes. Solid cylinders or drums are used often, as are boxes of solid rectangular shape. It is recognized that a cube is a solid rectangle of equal dimensions.
Because both pallets and containers in the industrial material handling technology are facilitators of storage and movement of goods, they can both be considered disposable in some industries and susceptible to recycling in others. In this sense, recycling means both re-use for the same purpose and re-constitution into another product of the same composition.
Safety concerns of these material handling items are paramount in wise industries. Because a solid cylinder has a cylindrical surface between two flat circular surfaces, it is most unwieldy to maneuver and can be quite dangerous. Elaborate transport hand trucks, such as those seen in U.S. Pat. No. 5,042,962 (Lechnir), have been made to grip the reinforced rims of the drum where the cylindrical surface joins the flat circular surfaces. Otherwise, a curved surface is being restrained on a flat or slightly curved hand truck frame with straps, leaving the handler and those around that person susceptible to danger of slippage or strap breakage of several hundred pounds of momentum on a curved edge or surface.
Increasingly, environmental concerns are also quite important in wise industries. A metal drum, once emptied, requires expense to transport as a return item to its producer or to dispose as metallic waste. Neither of those options is particularly economical. Far more often, a drum of corrugated paper reinforced with metal chimes at the junction of flat and curved surfaces is used. But re-use of these drums faces the same poor economics as does a metal drum. Re-constitution of the paper portion and the metal portion requires additional time and effort. Disposal is increasingly an unavailable choice, especially as solid waste for landfill capacity reasons and environmental concerns.